Twitter Is Adding In A New Topics Bar To Its Interface, Attempting To Encourage Users To Engage With A More Diverse Lineup Of Content

Twitter’s testing out a new Topics Bar feature, which essentially adds potential topics of interest as categories right below the Home/Latest Tweets tabs on the platform’s interface.

Twitter’s on a constant mission in order to make sure that its platform is being interacted with on a regular basis. Okay, to be fair, literally every social media platform in the world has the same goal, but Twitter’s hill is much steeper and its boulder a tad bit heavier than the rest. For starters, younger generations continue to display a disinterest in the platform’s microblogging nature, with TikTok and Reels captions serving as more than enough to convey one’s point across. Twitter’s also a much more serious platform as compared to other social media sites, with community-oriented features such as Communities only having been introduced recently to the mix. With all of these issues in tow, one would rather just rely on the likes of Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok for their daily dose of content and current affairs. However, this article isn’t here to dismiss Twitter since the platform continues to enjoy a massive amount of success; it’s just that not much of it is coming from the future generations of netizens.

In the interest of ensuring that people actually interact with the platform’s content, Twitter is introducing the Topics Bar feature. This is distinct from the Trending panel and the Latest Tweets tab in a few ways. The former just presents hashtags that are gaining traction in your specific geographic area, as opposed to concretely established topics, and the latter provides new tweets that come from either accounts that you follow, or ones adjacent to them. The Topics Bar provides users with topics that are trending on a worldwide basis, and therefore provide a level of diversity to the content they engage with. It’s a smart way of offering users new, fresh tweets while also keeping engagement levels across the board a bit higher.

The feature itself was revealed by social media journalist Matt Navarra, and its lack of presence on other devices implies that the Topics Bar is currently under A/B beta testing, or something similar. It should take a few months before being accessible by all users across the board.


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